


Valediction

by cairn



Category: Peter Pan & Related Fandoms, Peter Pan (2003), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: F/M, Gen, Growing Up, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 02:16:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14582721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cairn/pseuds/cairn
Summary: “You have two minutes, Peter,” she whispered into the stagnant air of her own room. Two minutes to arrive before she was well and truly grown up, finally a woman who could call herself an adult.





	Valediction

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Donne's classic "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," which I think applies in interesting ways to Wendy & Peter's relationship.

On the night Wendy was going to turn eighteen, she had a nightmare.

The nightmare had consisted of exactly two things, both terribly vivid, down the last exacting detail. The first was – for he had to be first, even now – the darting form of Pan, slipping away from her. She had been running through undergrowth that seemed to catch her feet as she stumbled onwards, her fingers just missing the bottom of his ankle each time she came close. He had been taunting her as she ran, his telltale uniform of leaves spiraling around his form – so tiny, she had been thinking, so much smaller than she remembered – just out of reach. He had called her old; his Wendy Bird had had her wings clipped. She could no longer fly.

The second detail to her dream, painted as deliberately on the back of her eyelids as her painting teacher wished her to draw the boring landscapes of London, was that the trees they were running through were not the thick, flowering jungles and forests of Neverland, but the grasses and wild plains of the Heath near their house. The trees were large but sparse, yet there always seemed to be a root stuck directly in her path. And far behind her, she could tell – because in dreams, you just always knew – her family sat on a blanket, a picnic spread out before them, and Michael’s voice was nearly inaudibly echoing in her ears, calling her back.

Wendy knew it was a nightmare because when she awoke, sweat had lined the back of her neck and made the collar on her nightgown cold when she had sat up, panting in bed, alone in her own room. The nursery was several years too young for her now, and the one comfort she had was the unlit lamp sitting on her bedside table. The window was shut, the curtains drawn. The one source of light was the thin sliver of moonlight that escaped down the center of the curtains, where they didn’t quite shut all the way. The tip of the thinly drawn line rested on her feet under the covers. Wendy stared at it, and then checked the clock on the opposite side of the room, squinting through the darkness.

11:54 PM.

Wendy’s gaze moved back to the crack of light at the foot of her bed. Six minutes left. When she awoke, they would have a wonderful breakfast laid out for her. Her mother would be lovely as ever, her father would be proud and bustling about. Perhaps a few tears would be shed at their daughter, now a woman.

But she had been a woman for so long, hadn’t she? Since the first blood was shed - not on her petticoats that Liza had scrubbed to get the stains out (and finally delivered them back, smiling at her and whispering she was finally a woman, as though embarrassing herself in front of her tutor with John and Michael in tow was something to be proud of), but on her hands when she bandaged the wounds of Michael and John (and Peter, always Peter, who would be angry to be last, and hadn’t wanted her to touch his cuts anyways, said he’d be proud of the scars), and realized her mother had missed her. She’d been a woman when she said goodbye standing at her windowsill. She’d been a woman when she’d broken down crying at age fifteen with the realization that Peter had forgotten to come back, after all, and perhaps she was just part of the game he had played for a little while, and he had never truly wanted a mother, had he?

And now, the day when the rest of the world would finally acknowledge that Wendy Bird had grown up and spread her wings out in the skies of London, free to roam wheresoever she chose, he decided to show up – if only in her mind – and mock her again. Wendy checked the clock again. 11:58.

“You have two minutes, Peter,” she whispered into the stagnant air of her own room. Two minutes to arrive before she was well and truly grown up, finally a woman who could call herself an adult. She would leave behind the final minutes of childhood at midnight, legally and socially: to all who knew her, she would be Ms. Wendy Darling, to be curtsied at just as respectfully as any other adult.

Her eyes fell, once again, to the sliver of light peeking out from the curtains. Wendy pushed the bed covers back and stepped out, bare feet freezing on the wooden floor. She walked the few steps to her window, closed her eyes, and pulled the curtains back, desperately hoping for a split second that she would see a dark shadow on her eyelids that moved and blocked the moonlight from spilling over her. But as she opened her eyes, her lips pulled into a farcical smile at the bare British landscape she saw every day.

“Two minutes, Peter,” she said as she pulled the latch on her window and struggled with the weight of it before finally, desperately, pushing it up above her.

“Two minutes!” she yelled into the freezing wind. “You’re running out of time!” The wind caught her hair as she leaned out of her window, looked up and around.

“You’re late, Peter!” she cried, eyes shut tightly to the whip of her hair around her face, status forgotten, the first-born daughter of the Darling family half-falling from her window in the middle of the night. “You only have one more minute!”

Sixty seconds, three thousand and six hundred milliseconds, and they were slipping from her as quickly as the dirt through her fingers when she’d tried to recreate the house they’d built for her in Neverland, constructed a tiny imitation out of flowers before Nana had accidentally knocked it down. She could hear his voice laughing in her ears, so vivid and joyful, as though she’d played alongside him yesterday.

When Wendy finally shut the window, fingers numb and fumbling with the latch, the clock read 12:06, and she was everything she had once wanted to be. She pressed her forehead to the frigid glass and felt her breath fog the windowpane below her. Her fingers clutched at the underside of the windowsill, and she wondered why the room suddenly felt so warm, why the final touch of adulthood stung no more than the first time Peter had yelled at her, than the first time she’d shut her window at nighttime of her own accord.

She walked to her bed, not bothering to close the curtains, exposing the vivid rectangle of light that trailed along the floor and up to the bottom of her bed as she pulled the covers around her. Wendy shut her eyes and reminded herself that nightmares only scared children. And she had ceased being a child long before.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written a long time ago (when I turned 18, incidentally... which was sadly a while ago) and only recently discovered... and not edited. Apologies for the teenage writing.


End file.
